“People mean a lot of different things by it,” she told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “You could also call Bernie Sanders a New Deal Democrat and you wouldn’t be wrong. And maybe he’s not even a very left-wing New Deal Democrat.”

Piven, a professor of sociology and political science for the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, observed that people are “eating up” Sanders’ policy ideas, which she described as unique to the American left-wing.